I'm writing as I heard last week of the sad news that you may not be doing'Jobs'.

While I am of course biased, I nevertheless want to give you my thoughts with the hope that this somehow stays together.

Certainly on Danny's part, he's long wanted to work with you again, and in the 15 years since "The beach" you have both grown immeasurably in your craft and abilities.

With this text, Danny feels he's found a script that can be as enduring a character study and portrait of our age and times as 'Citizen Kane 'was for a previous generation, from a writer who is the equal of Paddy Chayevsky.

With Scott Rudin, you have a producer who is perhaps the greatest ever at making intelligent, important films in partnership with Sony who, as we've seen with films such as "the social network", "Capt. Phillips"and "Moneyball" ,will spend the necessary marketing and publicity money to get audiences and award attention.

Steve Jobs was a man who came from nothing and nowhere to change the world ,as surely as Thomas Edison did, and and there's no better actor than you with the artistry and talent to help people understand what that must've been like.

Further, the production isn't set in the middle of the jungle, nor require a physical transformation, but will be shot in a city such as San Francisco, allowing you to give your sole creative focus to exploring the richness of the dialogue and character, with your pick of costars.

Just as you must surely feel great pride in helping bring Marty his Oscar on "the departed", everyone involved in this production desperately wants to help bring you the Academy award you so richly deserve.

I remember speaking with you years ago about 'boogie nights', and all you could have done with that wonderful part, and I truly believe this is an opportunity we will look back on with regret if we don't make happen.

Tuesday, December 9, 2014

"There have been few unexpected appearances as lovely as Dirty’s verse on Mariah Carey’s “Fantasy,” which created a bridge between unchecked lunacy and showroom optimism that nobody has been able to cross since."

"“We all want to meet the objective of consistency,” MLS commissioner Don Garber said in an interview this week. “We will have that once we are built out with the right number of teams with the right stadiums in the right markets.”

And then there is the issue of the league’s level of play. October brought a throaty squabble with Jurgen Klinsmann, coach of the U.S. men’s national team, over whether the best U.S. prospects should play in MLS—where they can help improve the quality and popularity of a league that aims to be among the world’s best by 2022—or in Europe. The best players reside there, and Klinsmann regularly and publicly states that he wants the top players to make the jump across the pond, despite MLS’s multimillion-dollar investment in domestic player development."

October 23, 2015
Written by Neal Purvis, Robert Wade, John Logan
Directed by Sam Mendes
Starring Daniel Craig, Christoph Waltz

The 24th Bond movie is just starting production this week and will be shot in "Pinewood London, Mexico City, Rome, Tangier and Erfoud, Morocco, Sölden, Obertilliach, and Lake Altaussee, Austria." Interesting that Star Wars VII has already finished production before Spectre started yet has a later release date.

Saturday, November 22, 2014

"Ask Mike Farah what's next, meanwhile, and he ticks off a list of "a few fucking things that I just know should happen." Such as? "We've always wanted a world-class auteur like Scorsese to direct the world's greatest cat video." Then there's the commemorative edition of Paris Hilton's 2003 sex tape. "I wanted to do a Criterion Collection ten-year-anniversary edition, where we would go behind the scenes and find out that, like, Steven Soderbergh directed it and all these amazing people worked on it," Farah says, clearly still holding out hope. "She told me she'd do it, and then she didn't end up doing it. If she reads this, we still should do that. I mean, who doesn't want to see that?""

GQ's Mark Anthony Green: "I've always put the ability to handle celebritydom on a spectrum—some are more allergic than others. On one end of the spectrum, you have Beyoncé, who's incredible at being famous..."

Thursday, November 20, 2014

"But playing style is another matter, and by moving from the Spanish to the German soccer culture, Guardiola has embarked on a journey not unlike Picasso’s from the Blue Period to the Rose Period. At Barcelona, Guardiola presided over the apotheosis of tiki-taka, employing short passes to dominate possession, move slowly downfield and suffocate opponents. In the season before Guardiola’s arrival, Bayern had won everything with a more traditional German approach, relying on superior athleticism and blistering counterattacks after defending mostly in its own end of the field.

Guardiola, who learned to speak German before his move, argues that he now has to be the one to change, that he can’t simply graft tiki-taka onto Bayern’s DNA.

“I have to adapt to the players,” he says. “Of course I have an idea [of what I want to do], but when you talk about tactics, we have to talk about the skills of our players. You have to analyze your talent and make an agreement together. That is the best way for the team.”

Yes, Guardiola has made changes. He brought in Thiago Alcântara, a promising young midfielder, from Barcelona. And he stunned Bayern followers last year by moving Lahm, arguably the world’s best right back, to the central midfield. He called Lahm “the most intelligent player I have ever coached”—no small statement from someone who has managed Xavi, Lionel Messi and Andrés Iniesta—and the switch worked. Likewise, Guardiola asked goalkeeper Manuel Neuer to become more of a “sweeper keeper,” venturing far outside his goal to patrol the back and allow Bayern’s defensive line to play higher up the field.

“[Guardiola] changed the way we defend and attack a little bit,” says Müller. “With Heynckes . . . we played more directly to the goal, with more risk but a bit less control. Now we want to play the whole game in the half of the opponent, defend and attack there. Attack with control.”

That’s the buzzword: control. “The coach is pretty simple,” says Lahm. “He wants control over the game. Preferably for the full 90 minutes.”

The result has been a fusion of styles that may well represent the Next Step in an ever-evolving sport, especially now that the tiki-taka era appears to be waning. “I think it’s a really good mix of the Barcelona style and the Bavarian style,” says Schweinsteiger. “In Germany you have the running and never giving up. For me, the first step is to have your own tradition, and then mix it a little bit with the Spanish or Barcelona soccer. We are Germany, you know?"

Also of note:

"In most ways, modern European soccer is noted for its unfettered capitalism, for the absence of salary caps and for the runaway ticket prices that are the norm in the wildly successful English Premier League. But German clubs still keep costs low for at least some of the seats in their stadiums. At Bayern, season tickets can still be purchased for as little as $180.

“If you’re a poor guy but you’re a Bayern Munich supporter, then our goal has always been to give you the possibility to go to the stadium to watch a Bayern Munich game,” says Rummenigge. “In the southern stands, for example, you pay around [$19]. We could charge three times that price, but we feel there is a kind of social responsibility.”
"

Monday, November 17, 2014

Sunday, November 16, 2014

"In January I flew to Tokyo to spend two weeks watching sumo wrestling. Tokyo, the city where my parents were married — I remember gazing up at their Japanese wedding certificate on the wall and wondering what it meant. Tokyo, the biggest city in the world, the biggest city in the history of the world, a galaxy reflected in its own glass. It was a fishing village barely 400 years ago, and now: 35 million people, a human concourse so vast it can’t be said to end, only to fade indeterminately around the edges. Thirty-five million, almost the population of California. Smells mauling you from doorways: stale beer, steaming broth, charbroiled eel. Intersections where a thousand people cross each time the light changes, under J-pop videos 10 stories tall. Flocks of schoolgirls in blue blazers and plaid skirts. Boys with frosted tips and oversize headphones, camouflage jackets and cashmere scarves. Herds of black-suited businessmen. A city so dense the 24-hour manga cafés will rent you a pod to sleep in for the night, so post-human there are brothels where the prostitutes are dolls. An unnavigable labyrinth with 1,200 miles of railway, 1,000 train stations, homes with no addresses, restaurants with no names. Endless warrens of Blade Runneralleys where paper lanterns float among crisscrossing power lines. And yet: clean, safe, quiet, somehow weightless, a place whose order seems sustained by the logic of a dream."

"To the concerned consumer, Fernald offers broad permission to indulge again. Her animals are raised in seemingly ideal conditions, and die about as calmly as food animals can. The ruminants eat only grass; the omnivores eat grain grown on the farm, supplemented with organic, G.M.O.-free feed that the farm buys. Her handlers practice low-stress stockmanship, gently coaxing the animals into trailers and corrals and into the twenty-thousand-square-foot slaughterhouse she designed in consultation with the animal-welfare expert Temple Grandin. The last sounds a Belcampo animal will likely hear are “Sh-h-h, sh-h-h, sh-h-h,” whispered by a handler it has known since birth. After that, the “knocker,” equipped with a bolt pistol and headphones, renders it unconscious with a pop. The breakdown of each animal is painstaking; Belcampo processes only eight cows a week. The result of all this care is a product that is precious in every sense: Belcampo’s premium cuts can cost four times as much as their equivalent in conventional meat. For internal accounting, the farm charges the shops “high market plus twenty per cent.”

“I live in a bubble and I’m trying to create a bubble,” Fernald told me. “I recognize that we’re creating a product that is financially non-viable for a lot of people. But I’m also prepared for when the health impact becomes undeniable and people decide to reprioritize their budgets. I think my bubble’s going to get bigger. Not because I’ll find more rich people—I think more of the rest of America is going to decide this is worth it.”"

Sunday, November 9, 2014

"[Vincent] Tan, Malaysia’s 10th-richest man, gained control of Cardiff City after buying 36.1 percent of the club in 2010. As incoming owners are wont to do, Tan made certain noises about refurbishing Cardiff’s stadium, investing in the team, and, oh, I don’t know, maybe changing a few little details like the name of the club, its crest, and its colors.

Now, changing the name, crest, and colors of a club that was founded in 1899 is not a thing to be done lightly. Cardiff played in home blues, was known colloquially as the Bluebirds, and had a Vale of Arryn–esque bluebird soaring on its crest. That’s the way things were for as long as anyone could remember.

Well, here comes Tan from no-one-knows Malaysia, rebranding Cardiff’s colors from blue to red (“a more marketable color in Asia,” it was whispered) and placing a rampant red dragon, front and center, on the club’s redesigned badge (a creature with “significance in the far east” one site noted, as if Tan had put a set of chopsticks on the badge).

Though Tan later denied he was planning to change the name from Cardiff City FC to the Cardiff Dragons, fans were, it’s fair to say, fucking irate. Many, if not all, of Cardiff’s fans wanted Tan out. And, really, who could blame them?

Of course, that Tan is a foreigner added no small amount of nativism to the discourse surrounding his ownership of the team. Not helping matters was Tan’s penchant for blacker-than-black illegal arms dealer–style sunglasses and the slick-as-hell look of tucking his red Cardiff home kit — worn over a starched-collar long-sleeve button-up shirt — into black slacks, pulled up half-a-hand’s length past his belly button like a villain from one of the Hangover sequels.

...

As all of this was going on, it’s fair to say that literally no one in the world, with the exception of Tan’s loved ones (and even then, who knows), was #TeamTan. He was labeled THE WORST OWNER IN THE WORLD by essentially everyone. After all, in addition to his callous disregard for more than a century of club history, his alleged lineup meddling, his replacing of Moody with a 23-year-old son of a friend, and his generally aggressive non-European-ness, Tan didn’t know jack-all about the sport besides, maybe, that it involved a lot of kicking and running around.

From the August 17, 2013, issue of The Guardian: “‘He doesn’t know any rules about football,’ Al Chuah, the managing director of one of Tan’s many companies, said before breaking into laughter. ‘He invested in pharmacy without realising what drugs are all about.'”

"Rose's private plane landed at Midway Airport, a little while later he walked into his apartment high above the city. Sometimes he stands at the floor-to-ceiling windows and thinks. He can see his old neighborhood from his living room, and of all the distances people measure in their lives, such as the 30 months since he tore his ACL, this is the distance that matters the most."

Thursday, November 6, 2014

"The Star Wars creator announced last summer that he'd chosen the Windy City over San Francisco and Los Angeles to be the site of a new building designed to house his vast personal collection of movie props and classic artworks (including some works by famed American painter Norman Rockwell). Now we have an idea of what the Lucas Museum of Narrative Art will look like when it's completed for a planned opening in 2018. "

"That his films manage to be both mainstream blockbusters and objects of such cult appeal is what makes Nolan a singular, and singularly admired, figure in Hollywood. He is commonly found sharing discriminating sentences of praise with James Cameron on the one hand and Paul Thomas Anderson on the other; he has been anointed, without any apparent campaigning on his own behalf, the successor of both Steven Spielberg and Stanley Kubrick. His loyalists have consistently and strenuously defended him against critics who claim that although he may be a masterful technician, he’s not a visionary or true auteur. Regardless of the visionary question, however, it’s pretty much impossible to think of a film that grossed more than a billion dollars and is better than “The Dark Knight” — or, to think of it in the way that Nolan prefers, a better film that was seen, so many times over, by so many people."

"In order to get Americans excited about the manned spaceflight program and the race to the moon, NASA turned its first seven astronauts into media stars. This was in sharp contrast to the way that test pilots, a few of those seven astronauts among them, had been treated in the past. The men who flew jet fighters while they were being developed were mostly anonymous, so that when one of them died in a crash or a fire it wasn’t an occasion for national mourning."

"The probability of catastrophe only increases, for example, if astronauts fly beyond the moon, to visit a captured asteroid, or if they try to match orbits with a near-Earth asteroid—or, of course, if they eventually set out for Mars. It’s not clear which, if any, of these adventures will actually happen, but given Americans’ continued enthusiasm for space exploration, in principle at least, payloads will continue to be destroyed. And yes, people will occasionally die. This is nothing more than the nature of space travel."

"Luber — a fanatical sneaker collector himself, with 178 pairs on display in his home — says eBay’s sneaker business totaled $338 million in the last year, up 31 percent from the year before. Sneakers, he says, have become “boxes of cash” for many people. As soon as Foot Lockers across the country open each Saturday, thousands of pairs are on eBay."

Sunday, October 19, 2014

"Before (re)writing a word of Interstellar, Nolan did something he had never done before, something that speaks to his desire for more emotionally potent work. He asked composer Hans Zimmer to write some music for the film, but without telling him about the genre, title, characters, or plot: “I said, ‘I am going to give you an envelope with a letter in it. One page. It’s going to tell you the fable at the center of the story. You work for one day, then play me what you have written.’ He was up for it. And it was perfect. He gave me the heart of the movie.” Zimmer says he remembers this idea from Nolan’s letter: “Once we become parents, we can’t help but look at ourselves through the eyes of our children.”"

"Style fills the gap between how you see yourself and how you want other people to see you. It is not a mysterious quality reserved for Cary Grant or Liberace. You have a sense of it in there somewhere. It's just a matter of finding a way to express it without seeming like you're trying."

Wednesday, October 15, 2014

"For years I've watched craft-beer aficionados go on about their triple-hopped IPAs and cocoa-flavored English milk stouts while inside I've harbored a dark secret: I love cheap, watery swill. Singha, Tecate, Miller High Life—they're all the champagnes of beer, and for more reasons than you think"

"One reason for this is that a mechanical wristwatch is only partly a timekeeping device, said Michael L. Friedman, official historian for the 140-year-old Swiss watchmaker Audemars Piguet. It is also a complex and nuanced object.

“Guys look at their watches as many as 30 times a day,” Mr. Friedman said. “They are not looking at them to tell time.”

They are, he suggested, regarding the timepiece as an article of jewelry (for most men, a watch is the sole piece of jewelry considered socially acceptable to wear) and equally a status symbol; or as an example of fine industrial design and advanced engineering; or as a link to horological traditions centuries in the making; or as a talismanic man-made symbol of the cosmic forces around which human days are ordered."

"So I want you to watch this movie and think only about staging, how the shots are built and laid out, what the rules of movement are, what the cutting patterns are. See if you can reproduce the thought process that resulted in these choices by asking yourself: why was each shot—whether short or long—held for that exact length of time and placed in that order? Sounds like fun, right? It actually is. To me. Oh, and I’ve removed all sound and color from the film, apart from a score designed to aid you in your quest to just study the visual staging aspect." - Soderbergh